Contextual Effects in Open Innovation: A Multi-Country Comparison

Abstract

This paper contributes to the understanding of the context dependency of open innovation. It does so by empirically analysing the relationship between innovation activities, firm characteristics and the degree of innovation openness of manufacturing companies in three European countries with varying degrees of technological development. Logistic regression analysis is used to study CIS data from Germany, Portugal and Bulgaria. In line with the contingency approach to open innovation, the results suggest that the appropriate open innovation strategy is context dependent, with similar practices and firm characteristics obtaining opposite relationship signs in different countries. Hence, it is important to take country idiosyncrasies into account when designing policies to promote open innovation.

The past, present and future of open innovation

“…Other relevant characteristics include the importance of patenting and other forms of intellectual property protection, market and technology turbulence, and market competitive intensity (e.g. Arbussã and Llach, 2017).…”

“…These authors argue that the irregular distribution of knowledge across regions may have delayed the shift from closed to open innovation in less technologically developed economies. By following this argument, Arbussã and Llach (2018) investigated whether firms in more technologically developed countries are able to benefit more from being open than their counterparts in less developed ones. They argued that the crux of the problem is related to the diffusion of knowledge.…”

Chief Executive Officer's traits and open innovation in small and medium enterprises: the mediating role of innovation climate

“…The generalization of our results is also a limitation as this study was conducted in Tunisian high-tech SMEs. It may prove helpful to carry out a comparative study between several types of industries, different countries (Arbussã and Llach, 2017) or between large companies and SMEs. Also, it would be relevant to investigate the Top Management Team features rather than the CEO ones, namely in the context of large firms (Hambrick, 2007).…”

Understanding the relationship between organizational culture and inbound open innovation

“…It sets out to answer the following overarching question: How do the different cultural traits of companies relate to the use of external information sources in innovation? In contrast to most studies on OI, we differentiate between product innovations and process innovations (see, however, Huang andRice, 2014 andArbussã andLlach, 2018) and analyze their connections to corporate culture. Our analysis also differs from earlier work (Kim and Ahn, 2020;Kratzer et al, 2017;Popa et al, 2017) because it uses a tested, wellestablished understanding of corporate culture, namely Quinn and Rohrbaugh's (1983) competing values approach (CVA), and it controls for the market environment.…”